The message I wanted was from "johndoe@johnscompany.com" and there was no spelled-out version of his name in the message.

Almost everyone expects that a search for "john" will get a hit on "johndoe" but in Gmail it doesn't.

The fact that you can't sort your mail by date or any other factor make this search restriction maddening.

I suspect this is because Gmail stores the messages with every single word indexed, and so those sort searches are very fast. That's a good thing. But for the tough cases, we really need some sort of brute force string search, maybe activated by a checkbox so as not to slow everything else down.

I don't know if switching to partial matches is a good idea. Yahoo Mail's search is like that and it returns a lot irrelevant results. Maybe Gmail could support regular expressions (or at least wildcards).

Go to the advanced search and there is a drop-down that includes all your labels as well as "all". There is also an equivalent tag you can use in your search string, but I never can remember it so I use the above approach. I sort of thought all was the default, but the word-search restriction often fools me into thinking I've deleted the message somehow when in fact it was out there all along.

It just seems natural to think that the Gmail search would be as forgiving (as in suggesting possibly misspelled words etc.) as the normal Google search is, but in fact they seem to be two totally independent things.

If I were in charge of Google technology there would be a fundamental rule: No two facilities in Google will operate differently (to the point of using the exact same code from a library etc.) without a very good non-technical, i.e. usability reason. They violate my mythical rule constantly for example in the differences between Google Aps IDs and normal Google IDs.

Eventually it moves from user confusion, to bloat, to bugs (after the developers themselves can no longer keep it straight).

This is what I hate about gmail, and about so many Google products (all based on the philosophy that SEARCH > SORT).

Jeez, how about giving us some choices, instead of everyone having to come up with all sorts of workarounds and plugins?

Sometimes SORT is faster than search. Sometimes I don't know what I'm searching for. It's easier to see a list.

I feel like I'm trapped between the Microsoft world of software where extremely useful features are buried 5 layers under useless propietary crap, and the Google (and Mac) world where all the choices are made for you ahead of time -- and they are good choices, unless you want to do something else.

The very limited search facility of gmail is a shame on google. It is maddening. How could google build something like gmail and then let it sit there with some of its most important features half working? So much my info is in gmail and I can't access it properly!

I'm still looking for the answer to a question Antonio posted, "And do you know how to find emails that have no label." I try to put labels on all of my my mail, but if I miss one how do I find it? Is there a way to search label:none (fyi, I tried that, and it doesn't work). Also I want to bring up my confusion between the difference in a built in label and one you create. When you search for the "label" inbox, it uses in:inbox. With a custom label, it's label:mylabel. Is there really a difference? Confusing.